CTR 147 / Summer 2011 “The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy”

Canadian Theatre Review investigates the power of performance as a tool for critical thinking and social and political action within and beyond the university theatre studies classroom. 


Some great articles, unfortunately you have to be linked into academia to access or pay, not very activist of them but hey suppose its changing the system from the inside. Or ask your Anonymous friend to hack it.


The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy

11 Rooms Group Show - Manchester Art Gallery

Just came back from Manchester International Festival, a really fantastic civic take on arts and culture integrated into an urban environment. Went to see Robert Wilson's Life and Death of Marina Abramovich, but seeing as it was one of the biggest cultural disappointments of my life I'll focus on 11 Rooms, a group show of live art / performance at Manchester Art Gallery.

I'm going to focus a descriptive analyses of some of the works that I felt were socially-engaged in one way or another.

Santiago Sierra - presented Veterans of the war of Northern Ireland, where a man stands in the corner facing a wall. Both times I went in the room it was a soldier in full army gear in a frozen attention facing the corner. I walked quite close and could sense his awareness but discipline to remain still. His uniform was crisp new and clean looking. I found it a powerful allegory that was both political and simple. Apparently there were many veterans who stood for a brief period of time and all were in civilian clothes but I didn't see this. I'm not sure how powerful the statement would have been for me with some guy dressed in black. A performer I knew in one of the other pieces informed me that the particular soldier I saw was not enlisted for the artwork but saw the exhibition and requested to participate, which further expands the work's impact in the social sphere.

Tino Seghal - presented Anne Lee 2011, where a young girl maybe around ten enters the room and engages the audience in a painfully scripted monologue about commodity, time, systemisation and self (there were a series of them playing the part). She awkwardly poses questions, waiting for an answer only to continue with segments of script. The effect on the surrounding audience was to stupify their gaze with a slightly condescending smile reserved for precocious children. It's very much about you somehow, as she asks: 'would you prefer to be too busy or not busy enough?' A good question for a room full of culture vultures who probably possess middle class values of work and commodity, Seghal prods the audience he knows will be there. But somehow you can't judge the littel girl by the same set of standards so her eloquent words seem to resonate stronger. 

Some of the other works also relied on acting skills, something that charges the performance with a whole other set of values and forms of communication and reception that resonate on a totally different level for me. An example is Roman Ondák' Swap, where a jovial man at a table requests or rather tries to convince oglers to swap whatever object he has for another. Reminded me of the man who traded a paperclip until it became a house. Its a game I also play with my students, but somehow in the art gallery seemed trite. 

I'll mention two more I enjoyed though I wouldn't categorise as Applied Live Art, still resonated: Laura Lima's Men=Flesh/Women=Flesh where the ceiling of the gallery is lowered to about 1/2 a metre off the ground and as you peer in on your stomach you can see a hanging lamp laying on the floor and a person with a disability laying inside. I disliked the voyeur aspect of it, and found it slightly didactic but was still a beautiful image. Finally the whole show would have been upped incredibly had John Baldessari gotten his way and put a dead corpse on display in the same position as Andrea Mantegna's Foreshortened Christ, instead we got the archive presented in A4 email format.

Paper Panel – Putting words in their mouths: verbatim and authenticity

I will be presenting a paper on authorship and community engagement this Thursday at Central School of Speech and Drama's conference:

Authoring Theatre


Paper Panel – Putting words in their mouths: verbatim and authenticity
THURSDAY 14 JULY, 16:15 – 17:45
REHEARSAL ROOM 6, WEST BLOCK

PUTTING WORDS IN THEIR MOUTHS: VERBATIM AND AUTHENTICITY

Chair:
Amanda Stuart Fisher

Presenters:
Maria Jose Contreras Lorenzini - Dramaturgies of the real In Chile: the problem of authorship
Steve Gilroy - Let’s get real about ‘verbatim’
Roberto Sánchez-Camus – Triangulated City Beirut: Co-Authorship in Applied Live Art

THURSDAY 14 JULY, 16:15 – 17:45
REHEARSAL ROOM 6, WEST BLOCK

You can read my abstract online.